TiSEM Blogs
The TiSEM Blogs gives you the inside track on research at Tilburg School of Economics and Management.
Blogs
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What are the real effects of climate-related disclosures?
Policymakers set standards for firms’ reporting on climate-related matters to enable market participants to factor in risks, instill discipline and encourage firms to adopt cleaner practices. However, the costs and benefits of these rules are not entirely clear. Lucas Mahieux, Haresh Sapra and Gaoqing Zhang study the real effects of mandated disclosures. Their key policy recommendation is that disclosure requirements should not be set in isolation but coordinated globally.
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The UBS-Credit Suisse Merger: Helvetia’s Gift
The example of the UBS-CS emergency rescue deal shows that the reforms adopted after the GFC are still insufficient for resolving systemically relevant banks. Helvetia's gift seems surprisingly high, making us pause for thought about the efficiency of current banking regulation.
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Togetherness in the Household
Surprisingly, little is known about how couples value togetherness, or spending time with each other. What benefits and costs does that accrue, how does it interact with other uses of time?
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How Firms’ Simultaneous Release of Information Affects Market Feedback
Can managers obtain more useful feedback from capital markets by disclosing pieces of information separately and at different times instead of bundling the information and releasing it at once?
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Value and Momentum from the Perspective of Financial Professionals
Value and momentum remain among the most popular investment styles of professional investors and fund managers. Historically, these strategies have performed very well, even despite temporary setbacks. But does this higher performance also imply that value and momentum strategies are associated with increased risk?
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Separating Auditing from Consulting: More Complex than it Seems
The business of auditing companies has a built-in conflict: The company pays the auditor’s fees, which might dampen the auditor’s enthusiasm for delivering unwelcome news to company management.
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How dangerous is an “all-eggs-in-one-basket” strategy? The effect of customer dependence on young firm survival and growth
Attracting customers is one of the hardest challenges and most important milestones for entrepreneurial firms. But the challenge doesn’t end there: once your venture has customers, how should you manage them? Is it good to have a large customer portfolio with each individual customer accounting for a small percentage of sales? Or is it better to have a few key customers that generate a significant chunk of your firm’s revenues?
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Why would passive funds invest in corporate governance?
Ownership by passively managed funds has increased over the last 20 years. They are called passive because they hold stock in proportion to the company's weight on a published index. Being tied to indexes means they cannot modify the weight of a specific company in their portfolio.
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Improving Agility, Adaptability, Alignment, Accessibility and Affordability in Nanostore Supply Chains
In developing economies, nanostores (i.e., small independent neighborhood stores) in urban and rural areas face different infrastructural, operational, and financial challenges. How can urban nanostores compete with supermarket chains as they enter the market? How can rural nanostores provide more services at affordable prices to sustain their operations?
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Homogeneous Brands Cause Extreme Judgments of Products
Imagine you are at your neighborhood bicycle store, and find yourself looking at a new brand of bicycles. As you read about the brand, you see that they only make bikes. How would this perception affect your experience test-riding the bike, compared to if the brand makes a lot of other different products besides bikes?
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When does the left-side-digit tactic work best?
We all know the practice of pricing products just below round amounts. It has been around for almost a century. Retailers set prices at, for instance, $2.99 instead of $3.00, expecting to benefit from consumers’ tendency to focus on prices’ left-most digits. But in what circumstances does this practice work best? Tatiana Sokolova and her colleagues Satheesh Seenivasan and Manoj Thomas searched for answers.
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Does Borrowing from the Private Markets Cost More Than Borrowing From The Public Markets?
Nonbank corporate lending climbs to a new record high. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, nonbank corporate lending experienced another spike in growth. In the US, nonbank lending now amounts to almost 50% in relation to GDP, the same ratio for bank lending resting at a stagnating average 11% for decades. The primary source of debt for firms is thus progressively provided outside the banking system.
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More animal welfare eggs lead to disparity in consumer welfare
Battery eggs are banned in the EU since 2012. The German government already decided to ban this animal-unfriendly egg from 2010 on. The animal welfare trend in food might lead to similar future interventions, also in other food products. But, in general, more animal-friendly products are priced higher. So how is consumer welfare influenced by this animal welfare development? What can we learn from the specific case of the ban of battery eggs in Germany?
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Bank loss provisioning rules: a convenient scapegoat in the Covid-19 crisis?
A better coordination between prudential regulators and accounting standard-setters will help banks to withstand this coronavirus crisis, which will in turn benefit the world economy.
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Unethical firm behavior often unreported because of media interest
Recently, in the Netherlands, pharmaceutical giant Roche was accused for not releasing their corona test fluid recipe. Their test producing site in Almere even was defaced by the lyrics ‘how many death’? This scandal was soon overshadowed by the overwhelming other corona news, but corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) events such as human rights violations, corruption, and environmental scandals are increasingly moving into the forefront of society’s attention.
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Consumers with Low Self-Esteem Choose Inferior Products
Products can make people feel great about themselves. Enjoying an exquisite glass of wine in a fancy bar sure sounds like great ways to give your ego a little boost. Yet, why do so many people shop at discounters, get their hair cut at budget salons? Who chooses inferior products, and why?
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Attracting early stage investors through an effective start-up governance
An important question for academics and practitioners alike is whether entrepreneurial firms rely on signals to demonstrate their attractiveness in the financing market. Recently countries like the Netherlands have emerged in the start-ups arena featuring big fundraisings. However, attracting outside investors remains a key challenge.
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How well can we predict life trajectories?
The explosion of computing power, the ever-increasing availability of data and the large inflow of people in fields like data science and machine learning, have led to successes in various fields. In the social sciences, we increasingly see applications such as policy makers using predictive models in the context of criminal justice or child protective services.
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Why Politicians Actively Intervene in Accounting Regulation
Regulation, and especially a technical issue such as financial accounting, is often considered a matter for bureaucrats, not for politicians. In doing so, we tend to neglect that many accounting rules have real economic or social consequences.
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Background Ads are Everywhere, But How Do They Affect People?
People often encounter advertisements in the background while primarily focused on other stimuli (e.g., while multitasking). For example, someone may listen to the radio while browsing the internet, checking social media, or performing a variety of other tasks.
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Anatomy of political risk
Quantifying the economic impact of risks emanating from the political system (e.g., referendum in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, shutdown of the federal government in the United States) has often proven difficult due to a lack of firm-level data on exposure to political risk and on the political issues firms are most concerned about.
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The procyclicality of banking in the euro area
A high procyclicality of banks’ loan loss provisioning is undesirable from a financial stability perspective, as it implies that bank capitalisations are more negatively affected at the trough of the business cycle, exactly when capital market conditions for banks are at their weakest.
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Riding the bubble on low interest rates: evidence from the South Sea
Over the past years, a growing number of economists have become convinced that a new era has started – one characterized by unprecedentedly low interest rates. As a result, pundits discuss many disruptive effects inherent to this evolution.
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Instrumental and affective ties within the laboratory: The impact of informal cliques on innovative productivity
Innovation within firms is influenced by the relationships individuals create and maintain among each other. In particular, knowledge-sharing ties can provide access to diverse knowledge that can enhance their innovative performance.
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Taste-based discrimination: evidence from the Netherlands
Stereotyping is not the sole cause of discrimination against ethnic groups applying for jobs or seeking to rent a house. According to research by Elena Cettolin and Sigrid Suetens, it is also a matter of ‘taste-based discrimination’ by employers and landlords.
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During World War II, African American soldiers made England a less racist place, lasting until this day
Can we reduce racial prejudice or is it a constant of the human condition? And can interventions unfold effects that persist? Especially in light of recent events such as the Syrian refugee crisis, and more recently, the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, answers to these questions are desperately needed.
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